Excited-state lifetime of the NV- infrared transition in diamond

• Main Authors: Ulbricht, Ronald, Loh, Zhi-Heng
• Other Authors: School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Light-matter Interaction; Ultrafast Optics; DRNTU::Science::Physics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/89949; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/46430
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The negatively charged nitrogen vacancy (NV-) defect in diamond serves as a popular platform for manipulating and exploiting long-lived coherent spin dynamics at room temperature combined with optical readout. The required spin polarization of the spin triplet 3A2 electronic ground state occurs through a cycle of repetitious optical photoexcitation events to the 3E electronic excited state that is accompanied by a series of electronic transitions to a 1A1 and a 1E electronic state, and back to the 3A2 state. The timescales of these transitions are largely known, yet for the relaxation time of the 1A1→1E infrared transition, which predominantly occurs via nonradiative recombination, only an upper limit of 1 ns could be determined so far. Here, we employ ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy to probe the dynamics of the nonradiative relaxation from the 1A1 to the 1E state after photoexcitation of the 3E state and find a relaxation time of 100 ps at a temperature of 78 K.